


Seeing Clearly

by The_Dancing_Walrus



Series: Abominable Things [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Discovery, Gen, Growing Up, Human Experimentation, The Drift (Pacific Rim), Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 02:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9214163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Dancing_Walrus/pseuds/The_Dancing_Walrus
Summary: 'The first time she comes close to the Shatterdome’s secrets she’s a child, recently orphaned, recently adopted. She finds herself in a place apparently without people. There aren’t many doors and the one she stops in front of must be important because it says ‘Danger Keep Out’ in six languages.She tries the handle but it’s locked.'Five times Mako doesn't see Hannibal Lecter's mark on the Jaegar program and one time she does.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly drunk, please excuse any poor editing.

1-

 

The first time she comes close to the Shatterdome’s secrets she’s a child, recently orphaned, recently adopted. She’s wandered off as children tend to do and found one concreate corridor looks a lot like another.

 

She finds herself in a place apparently without people. There aren’t many doors and the one she stops in front of must be important because it says ‘Danger Keep Out’ in six languages.

 

She tries the handle but it’s locked.

 

She turns around, goes back the way she came and eventually she runs into Ranger Kaidonovsky. She asks (in Russian that is quickly improving) what’s inside the room but Sasha only says vaguely that it is used for Drift testing equipment.

 

When she comes back a few years later she finds the door open. It’s a large empty room, divided almost in half by thick sheets of clear plastic. There are three doors on the other side of the glass and a few holes in the floor. The only thing that bridges the glass is a little tray, which swings between one side and the other.

 

Mako can’t for the life of her figure out what the room is for.

 

2-

 

There aren’t very many people in the Shatterdomes who don’t mind talking about whether they ever tried to be Rangers. One of them is an American woman with a name Mako struggles to say.

 

She’s nice though and her Russian is good. She has a scar across her neck and a missing ear but her smile is always bright. Her hair is cut so it curves along her jawline, dyed a blue-black except for the tips that are a brilliant blood red.

 

Mako thinks she’s beautiful.

 

She never tried to be a Ranger even though she tells Mako she wanted to be. When Mako asks why she says her parents were killed just before she joined the PPDC and explains the psyche exam-

 

She’s kind about it. She doesn’t say that Mako _won’t_ be able to become a pilot but Mako cries that night thinking about it anyway.

 

She tries to talk to Marshal Pentecost about it and he doesn’t seem to like the idea of Mako talking to Audra.

 

She doesn’t know why, they’re both trying, gently, to tell her the same thing.

 

3-

 

She hasn’t quite started to think of Ranger Nakajima as her father when he dies. But he’d saved her life and taken care of her and the only other person as close to Marshal Pentecost was dying as well-

 

He’s a friend and she misses him.

 

A few days after he died, at the right interval in his funeral, a wreath of flowers is delivered to the door. There’s a card with them, written in English. Mako thinks they’re quite pretty, even if it’s a very odd, Western thing to send, but Marshal Pentecost frowns at the card.

 

He puts them to one side and forbids her from touching them.

 

The next day some American strangers arrive, led by a large black man with a sombre face. They take the flowers away.

 

4-

 

She visits Nakajima’s memorial a few days before sending her application to the Jaegar program. It seems the dutiful thing to do and she hopes it will put her mind at ease.

 

There’s someone already there.

 

A white man with curly black hair, grown a little too long and a beard that isn’t quite neat. He shrinks into himself when she approaches, putting his hands a little too firmly into his pockets.

 

“I’m sorry,” He says in Japanese that is oddly halting. “I don’t want to disturb you.”

 

She tells him it’s alright.

 

“Are you….family?” He asks and Mako isn’t quite sure what to say.

 

“He saved my life.” She settles for, because it is simple and true.

 

“Rangers save a lot of people.” He replies but he sounds like he means something else.

 

“Did you work with him?” Mako asks. “For the PPDC?”

 

He flinches a whole step back.

 

“No.” He says and his voice wavers. “No, I- This was a mistake.”

 

He turns around and walks away hunched into his jacket and Mako wonders what he lost when the Kaiju came.

 

5-

 

A wreath, exactly like the one that came for Nakajima, arrives for Stacker Pentecost after the Breach is closed.

 

Another pair, in the same style but distinct, come for the Kaidonovskys.

 

Nothing similar comes for the Hansen boy and Mako wonders if that is significant.

 

She doesn’t know how to contact the strange, large American man or whether he would want to take these flowers too. There’s nothing that odd about them that she can see. She thought the last time it might have been the card but her English is better now.

 

And the card is a simple, polite message expressing condolences for the Rangers’ loss.

 

+1

 

The only comforting thing about it was that Raleigh didn’t know either. She wasn’t sure how she’d have coped with it if Raleigh knew. But Raleigh was from the Mark 3 generation of pilots and it had stopped around the early Mark 2s.

 

They are…odd.

 

They don’t interact like any Rangers she’s known. The closest thing she can think of is the way Hermann and Newt bicker but their arguments are harmless and there’s an undercurrent to what Dr Lecter and Mr Graham say. As if they’re having several conversations at once.

 

They talk strangely as well, though their Japanese is impeccable. It’s the way they sometimes talk together, like one creature with two throats, the way they sometimes speak with the other’s accent and don’t seem to notice.

 

When they’re in the same room they seem to stand, always, in a particular order, Lecter on the left and Graham on the right. Each on the side he Drifts on.

 

Mako isn’t sure if they’re aware of that.

 

But she sees what the empty room was for now.

 

She wonders if it would have been better to find out without another Breach and more Kaiju or if it is better that she has a target for her rage and sadness. The people she loved lied-

 

They stare at her sometimes when she thinks that and it gives her a crawling feeling, as if she’s being studied. As if they can read her mind. Raleigh nudges her when it happens, draws her attention away and, once, when they’re alone he asks if she’d feel better with them locked up.

 

And the truth is that she would but there’s something about the idea that seems deeply wrong to her.

 

They’re _Rangers_.

 

They’re just the first ones she’s met that she’s afraid of. The first ones the PPCD gives a security detachment for other people’s protection.

 

She puts it off as long as she can but eventually she knows she’ll find herself talking to Lecter.

 

It happens after Grizzly, her fifth Kaiju and the sixth since the second Breach appeared. She wanders, her bones asleep but her brain singing, in to one of the smaller kitchens. And Lecter is there.

 

She doesn’t really see the three security guards, just the way he tips his head acknowledging her before he goes back to the fish he’s slicing. Mako doesn’t really spare much thought for food but she recognises the forms of Japanese cuisine.

Each cut is graceful and precise. Everything is ordered around him, everything in its place. It reminds her of the way they butchered their last Kaiju, its lungs pulsing useless in the air, its livers torn out, sliced and arranged like a flower in the middle of the street it destroyed.

 

Order amongst chaos.

 

They don’t talk about anything important, at least Mako doesn’t think they do. For the most part it is Lecter that talks, about what he’s preparing, the method, aesthetics-

 

It’s not particularly interesting but Mako listens anyway, watches the way he uses the knife, the way he arranges his materials and his tools.

 

She has watched Kaiju like this.

 

And she finds, like the Kaiju, that he is less frightening when she leaves. All things can be quantified, all monsters studied and understood.

 

And that means they can be defeated.

 


End file.
